Interview with Hugh Curnutt, Associate Professor at Montclair State University School of Communication and Media.
BIO: Dr. Curnutt is an associate professor in the School of Communication and Media, specializing in reality TV and the redefinition of television’s performers and institutions caused by the influx of media content that sought to blur the boundaries between amateur and professional. He is interested in examining how the same types of questions—issues dealing with celebrity, identity, labor, and production—relate to the proliferation of evolving media technologies, such as mobile phones and computers, and the various performative regimes, and types of capital, they foster and modify. This research topic is situated within larger academic discussions concerned with the rise of what Jodi Dean (2002, 2008) calls “communicative capitalism,” and aims to contribute to the growing body of research studying the decline of symbolic efficiency (Žižek 1999) in an era that is often characterized by information overload (Andrejevic 2013). He employs a mixed-methodology that draws on cultural theory, ethnography, institutional and technological historiography, political-economic critique, and textual analysis.
Host: Dr. Vanessa Domine
Executive Producer: Anabella Poland